Films/DVD Asylum

Posted by tinear (A) on December 01, 2007 at 05:26:43

silent (and talkie) film maker, Dovzhenkho.
The critic Fujiwara says it well:
"This beauty is always grounded in the complexity of reality. Dovzhenko opens Earth (1930; December 8 at 2:30 p.m.) with the tranquil death of an old farmer as he’s surrounded by his friends and family in his apple orchard. The main motifs of this sequence are all efforts to protect this death from time: the long shots of wheat fields, which frame the passage and recur within it; the sunlight shimmering on the old man’s white shirt and white-bearded face; his contented smile; shots of sunflowers, apples, a baby. The mood is of wonder, ripeness, completeness. The scene can be read as showing a symbolic sacrifice: the old man must die so that time, the Communist time, can start moving. But Dovzhenko prolongs, unforgettably, the timelessness of the moment.

There’s another sequence in Earth that’s as marvelous as any in cinema. It shows a young man, Vasil, walking home alone in the moonlight after an assignation with his girlfriend. We first see him walking with his eyes closed, the camera tracking back before him. Then, unexpectedly, he starts to dance. The sequence is extended in a series of jump cuts, as Vasil dances toward the camera, over and over again: each new shot is a risk, a fantasy, asserting an inexhaustible energy.

Each Dovzhenko work contains more different trains of thought, more image patterns, more ideas than we’re used to finding in a single film."